Sleep, of course, is a hot topic among new parents- maybe the hottest. It starts in pregnancy due to a combination of hormones, stress, and a little one pressing on body parts you didn’t know you had. Here are some tips for getting better rest while you await the birth of your sleep destroyer...er, I mean bundle of joy.

Being a mom comes with many challenges, of course, and many are difficult to understand until you actually find yourself in that situation: the toll a chronic lack of sleep takes on your body, how hard breastfeeding can be, how invested you could possibly become in another person’s well being, choosing where to live based on schools...The list goes on. One thing that is topping my own list lately (okay, for the last 17 years, really) is space! When I hear “Space: the Final Frontier,” I think of empty-nesting, not Star Trek!

When a mom comes to my class in the postpartum period, I always ask if she has a diastasis recti (DR). "A what?!" is the most common response. What the heck is "diastasis recti"? If you have never been pregnant, chances are you've never heard this term. Let's be honest- even if you have been pregnant, you may not know what this means! According to biomechanist, Katy Bowman, a DR is "an unnatural distance between the right and left halves (of the rectus abdominis), meaning that one (or both) of the halves has pulled away from the midline of the body." We often hear an explanation of a "split between" or "separation of" the ab muscles, but given that the rectus abdominis is…